There was no way to predict at the time Adam West It was during the Batman-wearing-pants era that comics would become the driving force behind Hollywood content. The $1.48 million 1966 “Batman” movie based on the TV series made money, but only the most delusional studio executive or fan could have imagined that after a 23-year hiatus, Warner Bros. would gamble $48 million on the return of the caped crusader.
Needless to say, that gamble paid off, and we now live in the world that DC – and Marvel – created. That that success has had a not entirely healthy effect on cinema, or even the film industry, is a point often made – Martin Scorsese famously compared These movies have been adapted for theme parks. And even as they have become more technologically ambitious, they have become predictable. They have their superficial variations, but as expensive propositions whose failure can undermine a studio’s bottom line, they are by and large conceptually conservative, with even the most artistic installments designed to give fans what they want.
Television, as I’ve written before and will likely do again, is much more interesting when it comes to superheroes. With lower stakes, there has been more formal innovation, from romantic comedy to family drama to dark soap opera, with a range of visual approaches and—perhaps most importantly—space to develop characters and relationships.
Two new comic book series are entering a battle royale for attention this week. As if to highlight their old corporate rivalry, one of them, “The Penguin” (HBO, premiering September 19), comes from DC, and the other, “Agatha forever” (Disney+, now streaming) from Marvel. Each is a chapter in an ongoing canonical saga whose overall arc doesn’t interest me much, especially given how many times these worlds have been rewritten, rebooted, and tweaked over the decades, how much there is to keep track of, and how short life is.
Cristin Milioti plays Sofia Falcone, a member of the crime family that Oz Cobb (Colin Farrell) works for in “The Penguin.”
(Macall Polay/HBO)
‘The Penguin’ picks up 2022 film “The Batman” and will likely lead to “The Batman Part II” in 2026; “Agatha” would be the second installment in a trilogy that began with “WandaVision” in 2021, and more generally a cog in the machine that is the Marvel Cinematic Universe, or MCU, which still feels like a part of the hospital I don’t want to end up in.
They are conceptually distinct and tonally different, but they share some characteristics. Each focuses on a villain, a recent trend, though the comic book Agatha was created as a heroine and is a bad person with a sense of humor, making her good company. Each plays with genre — like “WandaVision,” “Agatha” draws on a variety of TV shows and tropes, while “The Penguin” is a straight-up mob story with comic book twists and exaggerations. Both are superbly done; in terms of production, acting, and cleverly written scenes, they are nearly flawless.
In his early incarnations on paper and on screen, the Penguin was a demented socialite whose go-to accessories were a top hat, a monocle and a fake umbrella. Here, in his first starring role, played (as in “The Batman”) by Colin Farrell under a thick layer of prosthetics, the Penguin is a heavily marked, mid-level, lower-class mobster whose deformed foot gives him a penguin-like appearance; Oswald Cobblepot, his official name for many years, has been relegated to Oz Cobb. The Falcone mob family, to which he is a servant, are Italian-American gangsters from the New York area, and Farrell appears to have studied James Gandolfiniwhich it was padded to resemble the general shape, elaborating its speech.
The heart of the film is the Penguin’s drive to become the city’s crime boss, which involves a fair amount of lying, betrayal, murder, and more intelligence than his enemies give him credit for. With its class consciousness and sentimentality, the film is in the vein of Depression-era films like Scarface, Little Caesar, and The Public Enemy. The phrase “dirty rat” is used several times, and, as in the latter film, the antihero loves his mother (Deirdre O’Connell), who here has dementia.
Aside from his mother, Oz has only two significant relationships. One is with Victor Aguilar (Rhenzy Feliz), a kid from the projects whom he takes aggressively, then half-tenderly, under his wing, and to whom he shares his nostalgia for his old neighborhood and his philosophical reflections on life (“The world is not made for the honest man to succeed”). The other, antagonistic one, is with Sofia Falcone (Cristin Milioti, impressive as a sort of psychopathic Liza Minnelli), whom Oz used to drive. She recently returned home after spending ten years in Arkham Asylum and is ready to fight the patriarchy of the underworld. (Like Oz, she has daddy issues.)
They’re going to be battling for control of a powerful drug called Bliss, and, with eight episodes to fill, the advantage is going to swing between them like a ping-pong volley. Yet despite the flashback episodes that give each some psychological grounding, it’s hard to root for either of them – they’re both bad people! Still, things are going to come to some kind of end, nothing that can’t be picked up later. That’s how they operate in Franchiseville.
While you can dive into “The Penguin” (created by Lauren LeFranc) with little to no knowledge of Batman (aside from a sidebar, the Dark Knight never appears here), it’s a good idea to watch “WandaVision” (which takes a bit of inspiration from The Avengers) before moving on to “Agatha All Along.” (Both series were created by Jac Schaeffer.) A lot of it will be obvious and funny without it, but you’ll have a better time if you do. As before, the show is a comedy with moments of deep feeling.
To put it simply, WandaVision tells the story of the residents of a New Jersey town called Westview, who were held hostage in various parodies of classic sitcoms (“The Dick Van Dyke Show,” “Bewitched,” etc.) by a grieving Wanda Maximoff, the Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), in order to live with Vision (Paul Bettany) a life that the Marvel writers had denied her. Among those trapped in Westview was Agatha Harkness (Kathryn Hahn), also a witch, and not a good witch, forced by Wanda to take on the guise of Agnes, a friendly and curious neighbor (half Gladys Kravitz, half Millie Helper) and stuck there at the end of the series. Agatha had her own soundtrack (also called “Agatha All Along”) which went viral, charted on Billboard, and won an Emmy for composers Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez.
Agatha’s motley crew, from left: Sharon, also known as Mrs. Hart (Debra Jo Rupp); Alice Wu-Gulliver (Ali Ahn); Lilia Calderu (Patti LuPone); and Jennifer Kale (Sasheer Zamata).
(Chuck Zlotnick/MARVEL)
“Agatha” doesn’t start out as a sitcom pastiche but as a parody of a prestigious crime drama (“Agnes of Westview,” “based on the Danish series WandaVision”) in which Agatha finds herself playing a police detective investigating a murder. In this hallucination, her rival Rio Vidal (Aubrey Plaza), perhaps a more evil witch than Agatha, appears as a federal agent, who will harass Agatha in the relatively real world. We also get the first sly nod to “The Wizard of Oz,” which “Agatha” will darkly reflect in a mirror, when a deputy describes a corpse as “really, really dead.”
In order to regain her powers, Agatha embarks on the dangerous Witch Road and must master her caustic antisocial tendencies to assemble the coven she needs to accompany her. This ragtag, hapless crew will eventually include Jennifer (Sasheer Zamata), the potions specialist; Alice (Ali Ahn), whose mother was a famous rock star witch; Lilia (Patti Lupone), a medium; and the bubbly Sharon (Debra Jo Rupp), trained to round out the group, who was transformed into Mrs. Hart in Wanda’s surreal sitcom and is not a witch. Also present is a deadly Agatha fanboy (Joe Locke), called Teen (except when Agatha calls him “Toto”) because he is under the effects of a spell that blurs his name. Rio will also show up.
In the four episodes we’re about to present to you, their journey will take them to other TV series – a Nicole Kidman soap opera (“Huge Tiny Lies” is the title mentioned) and something akin to “Daisy Jones and the Six” – each with a mystery to solve in order to move on to the next stage. Will they see the Magician? Will the poppies put them to sleep?
It’s all well-made and very funny, but also suspenseful and a little scary, with a winning combination of the supernatural and the mundane (the witches argue over who’s serious and who’s dull when they sing a magic song). Agatha may not be a good witch, but she’s not evil, and she has her reasons. Hahn is hilarious, which makes her good company, no matter her shenanigans or acerbic remarks.
Marvel has been making TV shows for over a decade, but it’s been on a creative high since WandaVision with original, even bizarre shows, including the Pakistani-American series Ms. Marvel, She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, and Loki, which lean toward comedy and have touched corners that the MCU’s accountants would never have deemed fit for the big screen. You don’t need to know Phase Four from Phase Five, which we’re apparently in right now, whatever that means. Thanks to their ingenuity, they can stand on their own.
